Wednesday, 10 December 2008

Porritt: Important article in _The Guardian_

I don't normally do this; but this article is important enough to warrant simply pasting right into my blog, so here goes:

Press the panic button: It's much worse than we thought. An emergency review of climate change is needed immediately

Source: THE GUARDIAN

Environmental NGOs in the US had hoped - against the odds - that President-elect Obama might defy convention and turn up at the Poznan conference this week to tell the world in person that the US would soon be doing everything in its power to combat the increasingly dire threat of climate change.

That's not going to happen; but Obama did ask John Kerry, who is leading the US Senate's delegation in Poland, to be his ears and eyes, if not his mouthpiece. Kerry is certainly keen ("We intend to pick up the baton and really run with it here"), and no doubt he'll be doing a lot of behind-the-scenes reassuring. But there's something extra - and hugely important - that he could get sorted too.

All the discussions in Poznan are based on the scientific consensus that emerged at the end of 2007 from the fourth assessment report of the Inter-Governmental Panel on Climate Change. That consensus was hammered out between the scientists and the politicians as "the best available deal", reflecting both the political realities of world powers at that time, and the work done by more than 2,500 scientists between 2000 and 2005 - the cut-off year for the IPCC's rigorous peer-review process.And that's the problem. A lot has been going on out there in the natural world since 2005. There is three years' worth of published peer-reviewed evidence, a lot of it from the frontline of the eco-systems most directly affected by climate change. Those whose job it is to take account of all that new evidence (universities, thinktanks, government departments and so on) have a common message to pass on: the vast majority of those studies tell us incontrovertibly that the impact of climate change is more severe and materialising much more rapidly than anything reflected in the fourth assessment report. It's much worse out there, and it's getting even worse even faster.This presents a paradoxical challenge for national delegations in Poznan. Even if they wanted to draw on that new evidence base to justify more progressive policy positions, they would technically be out of order.This is particularly surreal in terms of all the evidence coming in from the Arctic, which has seen a 4deg. C rise in average temperatures over the past few decades. Arctic sea ice reached an all-time low in 2007, the Greenland ice cap is undergoing accelerated melting, and there are growing worries about the melting of the Siberian permafrost, which has the potential to release huge volumes of extra greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.It's this kind of evidence that has persuaded Nick Stern that his own 2006 report on the economics of climate change got it wrong ("We underestimated the damage associated with temperature increases, and we underestimated the probability of temperature increases"), and has led Jim Hansen, the US's pre-eminent climatologist, to warn that the current target for stabilisation of CO2 at 450 parts per million in the atmosphere is woefully inadequate. There is a growing school of thought that 350ppm represents a far more realistic safe upper limit - which is more than a little problematic, given that the concentration is already 384ppm.The Poznan Conference will, of course, be buzzing with all this - but government delegations will be obliged to stick with the IPCC's painfully negotiated 2007 consensus.So here's the brief for John Kerry: suggest on behalf of the US Senate that the IPCC should be reconvened as early as possible in 2009 to undertake an emergency review of all the science that has emerged since 2005. It should be asked to report to the UN by the end of June, giving just enough time to inform the debate about appropriate policy responses before the Copenhagen conference in November.Totally unrealistic? That depends how seriously Obama and other world leaders take the threat of climate change. But surely it could be done. If multibillion-dollar rescue packages can be put together at the click of a finger in the wake of a banking meltdown, why shouldn't politicians press the panic button in response to a threat that is infinitely graver than that?

Jonathon Porritt is chairman of the UK Sustainable Development Commission and author of Capitalism as if the World Matters (Earthscan)sd-commission.org.uk

I don't normally do this; but this article is important enough to warrant simply pasting right into my blog, so here goes:

Press the panic button: It's much worse than we thought. An emergency review of climate change is needed immediately

Source: THE GUARDIAN

Environmental NGOs in the US had hoped - against the odds - that President-elect Obama might defy convention and turn up at the Poznan conference this week to tell the world in person that the US would soon be doing everything in its power to combat the increasingly dire threat of climate change.

That's not going to happen; but Obama did ask John Kerry, who is leading the US Senate's delegation in Poland, to be his ears and eyes, if not his mouthpiece. Kerry is certainly keen ("We intend to pick up the baton and really run with it here"), and no doubt he'll be doing a lot of behind-the-scenes reassuring. But there's something extra - and hugely important - that he could get sorted too.

All the discussions in Poznan are based on the scientific consensus that emerged at the end of 2007 from the fourth assessment report of the Inter-Governmental Panel on Climate Change. That consensus was hammered out between the scientists and the politicians as "the best available deal", reflecting both the political realities of world powers at that time, and the work done by more than 2,500 scientists between 2000 and 2005 - the cut-off year for the IPCC's rigorous peer-review process.And that's the problem. A lot has been going on out there in the natural world since 2005. There is three years' worth of published peer-reviewed evidence, a lot of it from the frontline of the eco-systems most directly affected by climate change. Those whose job it is to take account of all that new evidence (universities, thinktanks, government departments and so on) have a common message to pass on: the vast majority of those studies tell us incontrovertibly that the impact of climate change is more severe and materialising much more rapidly than anything reflected in the fourth assessment report. It's much worse out there, and it's getting even worse even faster.This presents a paradoxical challenge for national delegations in Poznan. Even if they wanted to draw on that new evidence base to justify more progressive policy positions, they would technically be out of order.This is particularly surreal in terms of all the evidence coming in from the Arctic, which has seen a 4deg. C rise in average temperatures over the past few decades. Arctic sea ice reached an all-time low in 2007, the Greenland ice cap is undergoing accelerated melting, and there are growing worries about the melting of the Siberian permafrost, which has the potential to release huge volumes of extra greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.It's this kind of evidence that has persuaded Nick Stern that his own 2006 report on the economics of climate change got it wrong ("We underestimated the damage associated with temperature increases, and we underestimated the probability of temperature increases"), and has led Jim Hansen, the US's pre-eminent climatologist, to warn that the current target for stabilisation of CO2 at 450 parts per million in the atmosphere is woefully inadequate. There is a growing school of thought that 350ppm represents a far more realistic safe upper limit - which is more than a little problematic, given that the concentration is already 384ppm.The Poznan Conference will, of course, be buzzing with all this - but government delegations will be obliged to stick with the IPCC's painfully negotiated 2007 consensus.So here's the brief for John Kerry: suggest on behalf of the US Senate that the IPCC should be reconvened as early as possible in 2009 to undertake an emergency review of all the science that has emerged since 2005. It should be asked to report to the UN by the end of June, giving just enough time to inform the debate about appropriate policy responses before the Copenhagen conference in November.Totally unrealistic? That depends how seriously Obama and other world leaders take the threat of climate change. But surely it could be done. If multibillion-dollar rescue packages can be put together at the click of a finger in the wake of a banking meltdown, why shouldn't politicians press the panic button in response to a threat that is infinitely graver than that?

Jonathon Porritt is chairman of the UK Sustainable Development Commission and author of Capitalism as if the World Matters (Earthscan)sd-commission.org.uk